Gary Brown: Mind your grammatical Ps and Qs

Tuesday

Sep 25, 2012 at 12:01 AMSep 25, 2012 at 8:37 AM

Posted on the website for National Punctuation Day is what the holiday’s founder, Jeff Rubin, calls the “Dumbest Sign of the Year.” The sign was found in Chicago and its wording was sent to the website because it contained “Genius’s” instead of “Geniuses.” This is exactly the sort of grammatical mistake that caused Rubin to proclaim Sept. 24 as National Punctuation Day, which he says is his annual “celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis.”

Gary Brown

Posted on the website for National Punctuation Day is what the holiday’s founder, Jeff Rubin, calls the “Dumbest Sign of the Year.”

The sign was found in Chicago and its wording was sent to the website because it contained “Genius’s” instead of “Geniuses.”

This is exactly the sort of grammatical mistake that caused Rubin to proclaim Sept. 24 as National Punctuation Day, which he says is his annual “celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis.”

In other words, you’ve got to mind your grammatical Ps and Qs — those would be periods and question marks — when Rubin or some other member of his punctuation police force is watching.

Part of the celebration of National Punctuation Day on this campaign year was a Presidential Punctuation Mark contest.

“The rules: Write one paragraph with a maximum of three sentences using the following 13 punctuation marks to explain which should be ‘presidential,’ and why,” according to an explanation of the contest in Rubin’s newsletter, “The Exclamation Point!” The rules then listed the apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation mark and semicolon.

“In short, persuade us that your favorite punctuation mark should be the official punctuation mark of the President of the United States.”

Pictures of both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are pictured by Rubin. Proper punctuation, apparently, is a bipartisan issue.